i decided to sign up last night and test drive them for a month. Four connections maxed out 6 Mps cable. Had no problems re completion in the 16Gb I dl.
If my research is correct, they're one of a group of news-providers under one hat that are giganews-lite resellers.

If next month goes as the start (am assuming there will be an infux of new users putting more strain on their system), I'd say they give very very good bang for the buck.

Unimportant to me, but might be important for others - they don't provide for uploading.

Well since my 1 yr prepaid account to Newshosting was up in 5 days, I decided to tryout PowerUsenet. So far so good, the 4 connections maxes out my 5mb connection just like Newshosting did. And I tried a 49 day old posting and it downloaded it just fine. I hope they add a prepaid option, as the savings is just enough for my newzbin account.

So far it does seem like a wise choice early on Downloaded somewhere over 5.1 million headers across 4 large groups and have yet to see an incomplete. The retention appears to be far better than NH. Unfortunately I can't seem to get my connections to max out my pipe though. NH didn't seem to have that problem. It appears that PN is giving me 2.4Mbps while NH would saturate my pipe at around 2.8Mbps.

i'm using both newshosting and powerusenet. Havent noticed any real difference in completion of posts less than 30 days old; but once you get over 30 days to 50 days, powerusenet is better.
Both max out my 5Mps pipe with 4 connections running - initially when i startedusing powerusenet, I toggled back between the two to see if one has better speed than the other but didn't notice any real difference.

I heard that powerusenet doesn't allow unlimited useage, although they didn't specify exactly how much is considered abuse. well, if anyone's willing to download a ton from them, let's see what they say. Image link not allowed for unregistered users

Since there News server is actually a Giganews server I take that to mean there's no point in having both a Power Usenet account & Giganews account unless you want the extra retention Provided by Giganews

The completion would be the same From PU and Giga correct?

On a side note whats the fastest anyone has gotten and sustained from PU's 4 connections unlimited plan?

So I finally got an account from Powerusenet (I've been using Newshosting as my unlimited server). I figure this is the best place to review it.

In terms of speed, it seems to me that Newshosting is a little faster than Powerusenet when they are both working well, but Powerusenet is more consistent. For me, Power gets up to about 4Mbps and stays there. Newshosting will get up to 5Mbps but sometimes slows down to 2-3.

I've noticed that Powerusenet seems to have a really long timeout for each connection. Sometimes my computer crashes, and I have to wait a few minutes before I can start downloading again.

There was an outage earlier today according to Dex. I didn't see it at all. My shit just kept running. He's on Comcast. Couldn't get to the servers from his house or from his web server. I had no such problem.

I think it looks like a routing problem or Comcast is experimenting with filtering out news servers.

news.powernews.com and news.giganews.com both load balance between two alternating IP addresses in the Los Angeles region to g3-16.gw2.dca.giganews.com. Fifteen hops before packets are dropped and timed out from where I am located. I will have to seriously consider the services of Power Usenet as they are indeed using Giganews servers.

Quade wrote:Giganews doesn't have a cap. You far more likely to be capped by your ISP than by Gnews.

Giganews does have some kind of cap. I'm not sure exactly what the number is, but after DL ~300GB in a few days (Thanks to the ridiculous retention) I recived a email saying they were canceling my service calling me a "Unlimited Abuser".

Looking back at my NH records it appears to have happened in April of 2005.

As I recall, I signed up with GN and saw all kind of goodies since I was upgrading from my ISP's News service with only like 8days retention so I qued up a ton of stuff. A week or 2 later I noticed my speed was way down, and sent an email to GN, with the response I mentioned.

I'm not saying that I wasn't abusing the service but, at least a warning would have been nice before they kicked me off.

Angelus wrote:I have used Power Usenet for a while now & they seem to be the best I've seen for the price. I have no problem maxing out my 5meg pipe Only difference I've seen is Giga has more retention.

But how often does anyone need to go back further then 50 days?

and I doubt very much that you can break the 50 day retention and go use the 75 day retention with .nzb... if that was true why would anyone pay the extra 5 bucks

I guess you've never used NH, so I can't ask you to compare the two services. NH does allow the use of nzb files to go beyond the lower tier retention. and I guess you've never experimented with using an nzb file to go beyond 50 days?

Angelus wrote:I have used Power Usenet for a while now & they seem to be the best I've seen for the price. I have no problem maxing out my 5meg pipe Only difference I've seen is Giga has more retention.

But how often does anyone need to go back further then 50 days?

and I doubt very much that you can break the 50 day retention and go use the 75 day retention with .nzb... if that was true why would anyone pay the extra 5 bucks

I guess you've never used NH, so I can't ask you to compare the two services. NH does allow the use of nzb files to go beyond the lower tier retention. and I guess you've never experimented with using an nzb file to go beyond 50 days?

Ok Yes your right you can use.nzb & Newshosting to go over there
retention limit

I did use them for 3 years before dropping them for PowerUsenet I don't believe you can use .nzb to go to 75 days with PU and I still use Newshosting cause my ISP now gets there news feed from them

and when I pick an NZB thats older then 55 days with both my isp server and Power Usenet active it comes from Newshosting completely

I've been using Powerusenet for almost a year and they totally rock. It will almost max out my 6Mbps cable with 3 connections, but I usually leave it at 4 slots to totally saturate it. I haven't tried making any .nzbs for stuff over 55 days cuz I usually skim through all my groups every 2 or 3 days anyways so there's no need.

I'm totally pleased with their service and can recommend them. Only had technical problems once or twice and it cleared up within an hour if I remember correctly. $14.95/mo for the unlimited 4 download slot package is right on mark cost wise I think. They're a Giganews reseller so it's basically Giganews, but cheaper.

You can run the Giganews speed traceroute to give you some idea. I cannot use PU due to the fact my ISP Insightbb uses GN as their news provider, and they mess with the DNS. The DNS must translate to the same as new.giganews.com. Before Insightbb did this I had excellent results with PU. Since GN has the Europe server I can use that and max out my 10/1 connection. So... ISP can be a problem.

Keeps getting better and better $14.95 a month plan unlimited (haven't had my hand slapped yet by them) 6 connections just upped from 4 4 was able to max out my 8 MBps line, and retention has gone up to 105 days with no issues on old files.

Same as I rated them before 2 thumbs up
and they now offer secure connection on their 19.95 a month plan

Bumping this one. On my 20mb VDSL line (which is reality is about 12mb due to distance from exchange), can download at a solid 1.5mb/sec using 12 connections since the last few months. Done several terabytes of downloading, no complaints from PU. No issues with downtime or customer service.

Overall a very worthwile provider, offering exactly what they state on their webpage.

I know this is a bit off topic, but I thought I'd chime in case anyone was interested.

I've used Giganews for a while now and do date I've been very satisfied, mainly since I upgraded to the Unlimited Dls which sets you back $25/mo unless you want SSL which is $30/mo. Pretty steep compared to the monthly fees mentioned in here though.

I do get 20 connections and my speeds have been in excess of 14Mbs+ so not too shabby. They do mention that they have 240 day retention but I haven't really tested that yet.